The Midnight Hour Read online

  I wasn’t sure what to say. So I just kept taking notes and letting her talk. It seemed almost therapeutic for her to unload all this emotional family baggage as a way of dealing with her sister’s death.

  “Dani came along very late in my parents’ life,” she said now. “They were almost forty by then, and I was seven years old. Growing up, Dani and I were uncommonly close for two sisters that different in age. I was the older one, of course, and I always looked out for her. I helped her with her homework, I gave her advice, and I protected her from danger. But she was always there for me, too. She was my friend, my comfort, my ally, in whatever battle I was fighting. People used to call us the Bobbsey Twins. But then, as we grew older, the thing with my father split us up. I was always fighting with him. You have to remember that my father’s entire life has centered around law enforcement. It’s everything to him. He started out as a state trooper in New York, then joined the FBI for several years before going to law school and becoming a prosecutor. And, of course, for all these years, he’s been New York City’s most famous crime buster. He wanted his children to follow in his footsteps. When I resisted, that put more pressure on Dani. I’m sure she would have eventually gone into law—although he did like the fact that she was writing front-page stories for the Daily News about law enforcement cases. Dani was what he wanted in a daughter.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?” I asked.

  “A few days ago actually. She stopped by here unexpectedly and we went out and had lunch together. It was nice to spend time with her again. That hadn’t happened in a long while.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Oh, just some catching up. I had ended a lengthy relationship, she was looking for a new apartment, a bit about some TV shows we were watching—that sort of thing.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Well, just that she seemed very wound up about this story she was working on.”

  “What story?”

  “It was a case of justice gone wrong. Some guy was put on death row and then executed for massacring his entire family. A college professor. But then, after he was dead, new DNA and other evidence proved he couldn’t have done it. So an innocent man had been put to death. Sad. But it happened a long time ago. Out in the Midwest somewhere. Ohio, I think. I didn’t understand why she kept talking about it. I was going to ask her the next time I saw her. But now . . .”

  I felt a tingle of excitement. Ohio. Marilyn Staley had said Dani went on a trip to Ohio. But it wasn’t for an assignment, she had taken time off.

  “Did Dani tell you this was a story she was working on for the Daily News?” I asked her.

  “No, not in so many words, I guess. But I just assumed . . .”

  “I don’t think anyone at the News knew she was working on a story like that.”

  “Why else would she care about it then?”

  • • •

  All of Dani’s stuff was still at her desk in the newsroom. Her computer too. No one had figured out exactly what to do with it, so the desk sat there untouched as a macabre reminder of the young female reporter who was never coming back. What I wanted to do was get into her computer, but I had no idea what the password was. I also wanted to go through the papers in her desk but didn’t want to draw the attention of anyone else in the office while I did it. I had a good reason for rifling through her stuff, of course, but it still felt ghoulish.

  As it turned out, I didn’t have to do any of those things. What I was looking for was in plain sight. A newspaper article was posted on the bulletin board next to her desk, along with assorted notes and reminders there.

  It was a feature article from the Columbus Dispatch about a man wrongfully accused of murder that had been written several years ago. I took it off the bulletin board, walked back to my desk, and read it in its entirety.

  “BEWARE THE MIDNIGHT HOUR”:

  THE STRANGE CASE OF THE GALLAGHER FAMILY MURDERS

  BY EMILY GREINER

  In the spring of 1985, a man named Thomas Gallagher was arrested for massacring his family in the town of Logan Point, Ohio.

  Gallagher was a professor at Ohio Southern College there. Friends and co-workers and students described him as a quiet, mild-mannered man who hardly ever even raised his voice in the classroom. They said he was a devoted father. A loving husband. A model citizen.

  Until April 26, 1985.

  On that night Gallagher arrived home just before midnight. Police gave this account of what happened next:

  His wife was watching television in the living room. He went into the kitchen, took out a butcher knife, and stabbed her a total of fourteen times with it. He walked into the bedroom where his two young daughters—one six years old, the other four—were sleeping. He slit both of the little girls’ throats. Finally, he came back into the living room, dipped his hands into his wife’s blood and used it to write a bizarre message on the wall.

  The message said: “Beware the midnight hour!”

  Then he dialed 911, sat down on the floor—with the carnage all around him—and began to cry.

  When the police arrived, they found him sitting there over his wife’s body with the bloody knife still in his hand.

  Gallagher told police he didn’t remember anything that had happened. He said he’d gone out that night to tutor a student in English literature, something he did several evenings a week to augment his income. But the student never showed up. So he went to the Ohio Southern library to return some books. Then he stopped at a nearby bar. That was the last thing he remembered, he claimed. Until he found himself sitting in the blood of his own family.

  The police didn’t believe a word of it. Nothing about his story checked out. There was no record of him returning any books at the library. No one at the bar remembered seeing him either. Tests administered by the police after his arrest found evidence of a massive amount of drugs in his system. The drug was an LSD-type hallucinogen that Thomas Gallagher had apparently ingested sometime that evening.

  A jury convicted Gallagher of three counts of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to death. After all of his appeals were exhausted, he was executed by the state of Ohio.

  Several years later, the case against him began to unravel.

  Sometime during the ensuing years, a card was found at the library—apparently it had slipped behind a filing cabinet—showing that Thomas Gallagher did return several books on the night of the murder.

  A new witness also remembered seeing him walk into the bar that night—just like he claimed, although no one knew whether or not he had anything to drink.

  Most important of all, DNA evidence produced some shocking new information.

  Years afterward, law enforcement experts used sophisticated technology to investigate the case all over again. They found DNA on the murder weapon—the knife in Thomas Gallagher’s hand—that matched Gallagher and also matched the three members of his family who had been stabbed to death with it. But they also found a DNA sample on the knife that they could not account for. Someone else had been there on the night of the murders—someone else had held the knife.

  The case was officially reopened, but the trail was very cold. Witnesses were dead or hard to find, and memories had faded over the years.

  Police no longer believed that Gallagher committed the murders.

  But no one else was ever arrested.

  And so today, so many years after the horrific killings that shocked a college campus, this baffling case remains unsolved.

  • • •

  The reporter who wrote the story still worked at the newspaper. I called and asked some questions about the Gallagher murders and the subsequent fallout from them. But she really didn’t remember much more than was in the article. “Why all this interest from New York reporters in an Ohio case from thirty years ago?” she asked. “I suddenly get two call
s within a few weeks from you people asking me questions about it.”

  “Who was the other reporter?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure what her answer was going to be.

  “Her name was Dani Keegan. As a matter of fact, she said she worked at the New York Daily News too. Are you working together on this story?”

  CHAPTER 3

  I have an exclusive interview with Dani’s sister,” I said to Marilyn Staley, the city editor.

  “I thought no one in the family was talking to the press.”

  “Yeah, I know. . . . That’s why it’s called an exclusive.”

  I ran through the highlights of my conversation with Christine Keegan.

  “That’s great,” Staley said when I was finished. “Write it with as much emotion as you can. But be careful with the stuff about the father. We don’t want to look like we’re beating up on the family at a time like this. Especially when the father is as important a political figure as Jack Keegan. Focus on the sister’s grief, the father’s big hopes for Dani . . . that sort of thing. I’ll edit it myself to make sure it’s what we want. I don’t want any screw-ups.”

  “Have I ever let you down, Marilyn?”

  “Yes, plenty of times.”

  Staley was the kind of editor—and I’ve worked for quite a few over the years—who was fine when things were going good. But when things started to go bad, she distanced herself from you as much as she could. That’s what happened to me with the Houston debacle and with a few other things. Then when I broke another big story she got friendly again. Since then our relationship has been . . . well, not the best. It used to bother me a lot, but I got over it. I just kind of expected it to be rough around the edges. Hell, all I had to do was find Dani Keegan’s killer and I’d be aces with Marilyn again.

  “There’s more,” I said to her.

  I showed her the newspaper article I’d taken from Dani’s desk, then told her about my conversations with her sister and the reporter in Ohio and how Dani seemed to have been consumed by it.

  “She wasn’t doing this story for us,” Staley said.

  “At least not that we know about.”

  “Maybe she was waiting until she had something solid to tell us.”

  “My thoughts too.”

  Staley nodded. She was definitely intrigued.

  “I want to go to Logan Point,” I said. “Look into this old case. See if we can figure out why she was so interested in it. Maybe it has something to do with her death, maybe it doesn’t. But it could be a great follow-up feature about the big story she was working on when she died. What do you think?”

  One of the good things about not being a star reporter anymore is that no one cares if you go after a long shot, because you’re not that important to them for the basic day-to-day operation of the paper. I was counting on that with Staley now. And, as it turned out, I was right.

  “Okay, a day in Ohio,” she said. “Two tops.”

  “Understood.”

  “In and out, Gil,” she said. “I mean it’s not like you’re trying to solve the Kennedy assassination or something.”

  She laughed loudly. Like I said, I still have to live with all the JFK jokes.

  “So did you ever track down that second shooter who really killed John F. Kennedy?” Staley asked.

  “So many exclusives, so little time,” I said.

  • • •

  There are a lot of advantages to living alone.

  Nobody yells at you for staying out late. Nobody argues with you about the kind of music you want to listen to. Nobody complains if you leave clothes or dirty dishes around the place. And nobody cares if you decide to make spaghetti at two in the morning and stay up all night watching reruns.

  There is one disadvantage—one very big disadvantage—to living alone.

  Nobody gives a damn whether you come home or not.

  I thought about all that as I pushed the door open to my apartment. I had some exciting news to tell someone. I was on a big story again. The Dani Keegan murder story. I had just written a story about my interview with her sister that was going to be a front-page exclusive for the News—and now I was going to Ohio and maybe on the verge of an even bigger story. I was bursting to share all this with someone. But there was no one there. Just the quiet of an empty apartment. The same as it was when I left there that morning.

  I have a neighbor—a very nice lady, well into her seventies—who always expressed great delight in hearing about my journalistic achievements. I knocked on her door to regale her with tales of my day in the exciting world of New York City media. But there was no answer. I remembered that she was visiting her daughter in California this week. I tried the neighbor on the other side of me, but no one was home there either. I thought about going through the apartment building and knocking on every door until I found someone who was home and would listen to me, but decided that might reek of desperation.

  I tried calling Susan, but got her answering machine. I called a girl I’d been seeing off and on, but her roommate said she was out of town for a few days. I called some other friends, but they weren’t in either. I tried thinking of someone else I could call. I even considered calling Marilyn Staley, but she already knew what I was doing. I was all out of friends. I needed more.

  When I got fired from the Daily News a while back, I did some serious soul searching. I thought about doing a lot of other things with my life. I thought about going into public relations or TV news or working for a website or any other media-related occupation beside newspapers. I thought about writing books. I thought about maybe becoming a teacher. But in the end, when the Daily News offered me my old job again I went back to my first love: newspapers. I’m not sure exactly why. Papers keep closing, staffs are being cut to the bone, and most people think that in the age of the Internet and social media newspapers will be as obsolete as blacksmiths or the horse and buggy within a few years. But I still have this romantic notion about being a newspaper reporter.

  I guess I still have a romantic notion of myself, too. I dream that someday I can again be the hotshot star reporter that I once was. When every story and every byline and every exclusive seemed so easy. And I was young and cocky and thought it would last like that forever. Now I’m older and not so sure about anything. But I still hang on to that dream.

  I went back to the refrigerator, opened up a bottle of Amstel, and carried it back with me into the living room. I picked up the remote and clicked on the TV. There was a Superman marathon on one of the cable channels. I love the old Superman television show, especially the black-and-white episodes. Being a newspaper reporter seems to have been so much simpler then. Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and Perry White as the editor all fighting for “truth, justice, and the American way” on the pages of the Daily Planet. No twenty-four-hour news channels, no digital websites, no social media.

  I sipped on my beer and watched Perry White barking orders at Clark, Lois, and Jimmy. “Go ahead, say it again,” I screamed at the TV at one point, “say ‘Great Caesar’s ghost’ to them.” And, of course, he did.

  The thought did cross my mind that talking to TV characters like that when you’re all alone in your apartment might be a sign of impending insanity.

  On the other hand, even if it was, I was by myself so who else would ever know about it?

  I always like to look at myself as a glass-half-full kind of guy.

  CHAPTER 4

  The police chief of Logan Point was a man named Rudy Sewell. He was about forty with short brown hair in a crew cut style, and the beginnings of a potbelly were already beginning to protrude through his uniform. We sat in his office, drinking coffee from a Dunkin’ Donuts across the street while he talked to me about how Dani had been asking about the Gallagher murders a few weeks earlier.

  “Like I told her, everyone here knows about the Gallagher case. Hell, it’s
by far the biggest crime that ever happened in this town. We made the national newscasts with it. Of course, that was long before my time at this job.”

  Rudy Sewell hadn’t heard about Dani’s death. He seemed genuinely upset when I told him what happened.

  “Did they catch anybody?” he asked.

  “Not yet.”

  He shook his head sadly. “It must be dangerous living in a place like New York City. I mean, that young woman was right here—sitting where you’re sitting now—and she was so full of life. She kept asking me questions about this case. Now she’s dead. It’s a damn shame.”

  “Did Dani tell you why she was so interested in the Gallagher case?” I asked.

  “She was doing a story about it, right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Then Sewell talked to me about the Gallagher case. The facts were all pretty much as I knew them from the newspaper article. Logan Point cops responded to a 911 call at Gallagher’s house. They found his wife and two children stabbed to death, him holding the bloody knife, and the phrase “Beware the midnight hour!” written in their blood on the wall.

  “Who made the 911 call?”

  “Gallagher himself.”

  “Didn’t that seem strange to the police?”

  Sewell shrugged.

  “At the time they just figured that he was overcome by remorse and guilt over what he’d done.”

  “What about ‘beware the midnight hour?’ ” What did that mean?”

  “No one ever figured that out.”

  “Okay.”

  “Anyway, a number of years later, all the new evidence turned up that showed Gallagher had been innocent.”

  “Oops.”

  “Yeah, the anti-death-penalty people had a field day with it.”

  “Did this guy Gallagher have any history of violence?”

  “No. Everyone who knew him at the college seemed stunned. They talked about what a decent guy he’d always been up until then. Respected professor. Loved his family. Active in school and community affairs.”